Publisher's Weekly Review
If your opinion of Congress wasn't already at rock bottom, it will be by the end of Walker's shockingly plausible literary debut. Twenty-four-year-old Luke Slade has landed a plum job that's turned him into a cynic: he is a legislative aide to California congressman Leonard Fillmore, whose ego (in contrast to his brain) is large enough to fill not only the Capitol, but also, he hopes, the White House. Leo's richest backer funds a trip to China, where things go impossibly-and hilariously-wrong for Luke and his boss. Luke loses Leo following a night of drinking, and then gets mistaken for the Congressman. And worse, as the youthful "Congressman Fillmore," Luke accidentally accepts a briefcase of bribe money intended to cement a business deal with a Chinese mayor, who is soon found dead. China's no-holds-barred economy serves as the perfect setting for bringing these debauched and dishonest dregs of Congress out into the smoggy Chinese sunlight. As the situation veers out of his control, Luke's rising panic transforms an outrageous tale of embezzlement into a rollicking moral drama. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Slimy all-American graft oozes from beneath the economic aspirations of contemporary China in this witty, illuminating thriller.Walker's impressive debut novel is a post-millennial noir thriller in which the grubbier impulses of two superpowers intersect with life-altering results. Among the lives being altered is that of Luke Slade, a casually cynical young man condemned to endure ridicule and abuse from his boorish boss, U.S. Rep. Leonard Fillmore, R-Calif., alias "Leo the Lyin'," who's dragged him along on some vaguely defined weeklong mission to the People's Republic of China. On the second day, Luke loses the congressman, a professed born-again Christian and recovering alcoholic, in an all-night bender and must go in his stead to a rural province to discuss a major development deal. Somehow, Luke walks away from a meeting with the province's mayor with a briefcase full of American cash. Luke suspects he's been left "holding the bag" in more ways than one, and he frantically wanders from Beijing to Shanghai and back again trying to figure out what game he's unwittingly playing and who's pulling the strings. (It would also help if he could find his congressman, who's still missing in action.) As if all that weren't bad enough, Luke becomes the prime suspect in the murder of the mayor who dropped the bribe on him in the first place. The storyline grows murkier as Luke's week from hell gets worse. But as is often the case with quality American literary thrillers, what happens is ultimately less interesting than what's in the background; in this case, detailed and tautly rendered tours of both the smoggy physical landscape of 21st-century China and the even mistier psychological terrain of an aimless American forced to negotiate a clear path between risk and responsibility. Though its observations about China's construction boom and the dismal state of American politics are as fresh as the morning news feed, Walker's novel also feels like a disquieting peek deep into the coming decades of global economic upheaval. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This edgy first novel delivers a scathing indictment of congressional politics as it follows a young aide on a business trip to China. At the beck and call of his boss, Congressman Leonard Fillmore, a petty man with presidential ambitions, Luke has quickly grown disillusioned and cynical. But things take a dangerous turn when the congressman, last seen drunk and ranting about his nonfunctional cell phone, goes missing. Luke steps in for him at a business meeting and is handed a suitcase full of cash by the mayor of a rural Chinese province who hopes to get in on a construction deal. Disoriented in Beijing's smogshine by too much alcohol, a bad case of insomnia, worries over the missing congressman, and the dealings of a corrupt businessman who is underwriting the trip, Luke is convinced something very bad is about to happen. Walker's smart writing on a host of issues, including China's frenzied construction boom, which has paved over ancient traditions block by block, and the sorry state of American politics, gives this cautionary tale frisson.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN THE LOBBY of an apartment building in the Chinese factory city of Dongguan, I once saw this sign: "FOR THE PEACE OF RESIDENTS, RENOVATION WILL STOP ON JAN. 1. IT WILL RESUME ON JAN. 2." When this phase of China's development is past, will anyone believe that such a place existed? The mad faith in progress, the worship at the altars of construction and acquisition, and the scale of individual ambition all seem fantastical to anyone who has not seen it firsthand. "Last Days in Shanghai," a debut novel by Casey Walker, evokes this world with sharp observations and a soulfulness that is often missing in outsider views of the country. Luke Slade, a young congressional aide, accompanies his boss on a business trip to China. Like the subaltern Washington class to which he belongs, Luke lives close to the ground and doesn't miss much. Here are the earnest young women who dream of building skin-cream empires and learn English by watching "Friends." ("You look like the one called Ross," a masseuse tells Luke. "He is not handsome. But he is very educated.") Everywhere he feels the energy of people trying to get ahead: "The Beijing airport was an airlift and these the refugees. Or this was everyday life. I couldn't tell." Cabbies ferry their passengers through an underworld perpetually hazy with pollution ("Call it smogshine"). Even corrupt middle-aged bureaucrats - drivers of the Chinese economy, alongside the young women with outsize dreams - are accorded a melancholy sympathy. One man who fails to land a lucrative airport deal drowns himself in the Huangpu River, his pockets filled with stones and lines from classical poetry: "My heart was caught in a mesh that I could not disentangle; my thoughts were lost in a maze there was no way out of." The foreign capitalists who have washed up on Chinese shores have their own dreams of empire: "What do you manufacture?" Luke asks an American businessman. "Mesh." "Huh." "That nylon mesh you find on backpacks - the netting stuff. A million uses for it. If you stop to think about it, the whole world runs on mesh....And I'm the king." Walker's achievement is to turn this landscape into a reflection of our own inner turmoil, where jackhammers never stop, courtyard homes become gold-fingered skyscrapers and city blocks disappear overnight - a place at once dreamscape and nightmare. On his first day, Luke loses the schedule of his boss's meetings, casting him into a disorienting world of missed calls and mistaken identities. After a wine-fueled banquet with potential business partners, Luke's boss disappears. The next night - more alcohol - a provincial mayor hands Luke a briefcase of cash. Soon the mayor is dead and Luke is on the run from the police, searching for clues to what the congressman was up to and stalking a shadowy American industrialist who seems to be pulling all the strings. The story unspools in cinematic fashion over seven days, with a whirlwind travel itinerary: If it's Thursday, this must be Kaifeng. The yoking of A-plus writing to a B-movie plot is the novel's weak point. "Last Days in Shanghai" feels like a finely wrought piece of art mounted on a structure that can't quite support its weight. "I wanted to turn this night over to see the stitching on the backside, the threads that composed it," Walker writes. He is a talented weaver of stories; one wishes only that this tale had been more ambitious, like the people and the place he evokes so well. LESLIE T. CHANG is the author of "Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China."
